Abstract

In the present letter, the authors report on the realization of all-optical format conversion by using the cascaded sum- and difference-frequency generation in a periodically poled lithium niobate waveguide and the active mode locking in a reflective-semiconductor-optical-amplifier-based fiber ring laser. Tunable format conversions from nonreturn-to-zero pseudorandom binary sequence (PRBS) signal to return-to-zero PRBS idler at 10 and are observed in the experiment.

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No. 60577006, and by the program for New Century Excellent Talents in University (NCET-04-0694). The authors would like to thank Y. Yu and J. Xu for their helpful discussions.